Plut. Mor., Water or Fire 4 — Whether water or fire be most useful

Plut. Mor., Water or Fire 4 — Whether water or fire be most useful, Plutarch; served verbatim

Let us therefore make a step from animals that eat to things that we ourselves make use of, such are plants and fruits; of which some are altogether void of heat, others enjoy it but imperfectly and obscurely. But moisture causes all things to germinate, increase, and bring forth. Why should I stand to reckon up wine and oil, milk and honey, and whatever else we reap and bring forth and see before our eyes, when wheat itself, which is looked upon as a dry nourishment, grows by alteration, putrefaction, and corruption of the moist matter?

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

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Whether water or fire be most useful, Plutarch — translated by F. Fetherston (rev. W. W. Goodwin), 1874
Apparatus shelf + pinned Perseus TEI — Plutarch's Morals (the Moralia), ed. William W. Goodwin, five volumes · 'Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin, Ph. D.', with an introduction by R. W. Emerson; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1874 (five volumes; a minority of the TEI transcriptions were keyed from the same publisher's 1878 reprint)
license: public-domain (US: the Goodwin edition is an 1874 Boston publication of a 1684-1694 translation — title pages verified on all five shelf scans at acquisition; Perseus digital editions CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded per ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md pattern)